Thursday, July 28, 2011

Everyone who’s ever put fingers to keyboard for money is scrabbling around these days trying to find new ways to make it work. Fortunately for those of us who appreciate our sexual politics through a combination of witty writing and thought-provoking ideas, Mark Simpson has found a way with his new ebook Metrosexy.

Even those people who have never heard of Mark Simpson himself will have heard the term “metrosexual” which he coined in 1994. (Metrosexual meaning something along the lines of “man relaxed in his sexual and gender identity, who takes great interest in his own appearance and that of other men”. Or something like that. Aargh!)

He blogs at marksimpson.com, and sometimes has features published in magazines or newspapers, but it has been FAR TOO LONG since he last had an actual book published.

The book

Metrosexy (subtitled a 21st century self-love story) is a collection of Mark’s writings mostly, but not all, published before. So whether it’s Sporno (sports/porn combo a la David Beckham) or a critique of what metrosexuality has become (“metrosexuality was anything but skin deep, whilst metrosexmania pretended that’s all it was”) there’s lots to ponder over.

E-books tend to be substantially cheaper than paper ones, certainly if they are e-book originals, and not just another format for a large publisher. So at £2.86 (for 70,000 words), Metrosexy is a downright bargain. You can download it here.

The ideas

Mark’s work is all about about gender and masculinity (in men) and how men are seen and see themselves in the media and popular culture. Metrosexuality, for instance, is an indication that traditional gender differences between men and women are fading away. It has sexual ambiguity written into its very core. Where once men looked and women were looked at, now men delight in being objects of desire. They aren’t particularly bothered whether it’s men or women doing the desiring because, fundamentally, a metrosexual’s love object is, it seems, himself.

My own particular interest in Mark, and why he is of interest to this blog, is his own take, and personal experience, on bisexuality. In brief (pun sort of intended), he knows that men don’t have to be gay or even bi to have sex with each other. A lot. And specifically, in a period when mainstream and much of gay society considers bisexual men, or indeed bisexuality in men, to be bogus in some sense, here’s someone who’s not part of the bi scene, or even bi, who disagrees.

I also like Mark’s anti-respectable queerness. Most people writing on L or G issues these days are very focused on equal rights and, in particular, equal rights to marriage. He’s not.

He also writes about complex ideas accessibly, for a non-academic audience. Most books on sexuality these days that are about actual ideas are written by and for people within universities. That’s great for them (and just the way the publishing cookie crumbles these days), but not so good for the rest of us.

Him indoors

Alongside Metrosexy, I’ve also been reading The Spiv and the Architect (Unruly life in postwar London) by Richard Hornsey - a more traditionally academic book in the cultural studies field.

TS+TA isn’t really about spivs and architects per se. Instead, it’s about the post WW2 to 1950s development of the notion of the respectable homosexual and how he did and mostly didn’t fit in with the development of domestic and civic urban life. The book charts the way that male homosexuality moved from that of pre-war London, where men more often felt able to have sex with each other without being unmasculinised, or Queer in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

In the 1950s, where conformity to the nuclear family was all around, and heterosexual marriage was the most natural thing in the world, a few high profile legal cases highlighted the plight of The Homosexual and divided men who had sex with men into Respectable (wanted domestic companionship) and Queer/disruptive (cottagers, bi men, young men). While law reform (which didn’t actually happen until 1967) meant that men could settle down together, those who still wanted to take their sexuality away from the domesticated environment felt the full force of Lily Law.

So thank God to be living in a London where – despite all our many problems - metrosexuality is the new conformity, heterosexual and queer men both wear flowery shirts, kiss each other even when they’re sober and discuss the best product to stick into their carefully tousled hair.

And also

As she so rightly points out in the commments below, I was first told about Metrosexy by Quiet Riot Girl/Elly who (at that time) was promoting this book and Mark's ideas. So thank you QRG for that. And readers might like to know that she also has an e-novella out herself Scribbling on Foucault's Walls. I've only read 10 pages of it so far, but it's an extraordinary book, very unusual and engaging. And free. Free!

Friday, July 01, 2011

It’s five years tomorrow since I started this bisexual blog. I don’t update it regularly any more, but it has been very important to me as an outlet for my ideas on bisexuality when other outlets have seemed a bit sparse. And, as hundreds of thousands of people have visited it, it must have been of some interest and importance to a few other people too.

Below, I’m going to post a link to the entry with which I opened this blog. I wrote about EuroPride, held in London that year. Tomorrow is the Pride march in London too. I had a great time at EuroPride in 2006, but in general I find the lack of politics at Pride in London combined with vacuous celebration a bit wearing and tedious. And believe me, I LOVE celebrations in general.

I think the purpose of Pride should be political as well as celebratory – just as a quick for instance, there are homophobic attacks in the UK, and essential solidarity with people in countries where same-sex is illegal and strictly punished. There are tremendous queer activists, such as David Kato in Uganda who was murdered this year, to honour.

In the Pride press pack, their Love Without Borders campaign is one of the things they do talk about. But if you saw the Pride poster (seen on the London underground, but nowhere that I can find on the interwebs), you’d have to search hard to figure out what sort of Pride it was. Smirnoff Pride, perhaps.

There will be a bi stall and bi banner at Pride, London tomorrow and I really wish those attending all the best. It is absolutely essential that bi people are properly visible and there is even an international campaign about it.

Moving on upThanks (in a large part) to social media, there seems to be a lot more of a bisexual community than there was back in 2006, in the UK and elsewhere. Twitter and Facebook have put loads of people in touch with each other, and not just virtually. Ideas spin around the world soon as anything.

Also, there are many more bi bloggers than there were in 2006 when I couldn’t find any British ones at all. It’s very hard to keep blogging in the long term and many have opened and closed. But thanks to the Bi Bloggers aggregator site, organised by the ever-efficient Jen Yockney, anyone who’s interested in British bi bloggers can see that there’s quite a lot of it about. And of course there are many other bi bloggers around the world (particularly North America). If a bi celebrity comes out, or a prominent queer columnist such as Dan Savage opines on bisexuality, there are plenty of other people who can write about it. There are other aspects of bisexuality that people don’t write about, though, and when I write here in the future that’s what I’ll be covering.

Anyway, as anyone who knows a smidgeon of blogging theory can tell you, less is most definitely more. So happy bisexual birthday and Pride – whether it’s been or still to come where you are – and be happy that things really can and do get better.